Canadian Throat Singer Gives a Voice to Inuit Culture

When Tanya Tagaq’s Animus won the 2014 Polaris Prize – a prestigious music award annually given to the best full-length Canadian album based on artistic merit – it made international news. Not only did the Inuk throat singer unexpectedly beat out pop darlings Arcade Fire and Drake, but she used the opportunity to support traditional seal hunting, a critical livelihood for many Inuit communities, and criticize activists who oppose the practice.

“Why is it everyone else is allowed to live off their land and profit, but we're not?” she demanded, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “And is it because you think the seal is cute?”

Tagaq isn’t shy about controversy, often speaking out about racism and the impact of colonialism on Inuit culture. In a 2015 interview with The New Yorker she said, “My daughters are four times more likely to be murdered than any other racial demographic in Canada. So how do I change this, how do I help? That's what I'm projecting my voice for."

The names of 1,182 missing aboriginal women scrolled on the screen behind Tagaq during her performance at the 2014 Polaris Award gala event – a performance described by Montreal’s The Gazette as “euphoric,” “cathartic” and “a wordless juxtaposition of grunts, screams, whispers and flutters...[that took the audience] on a mesmeric journey evoking life and death, birth and rebirth, love and loss.”

Tagaq’s introduction to throat singing came in college, when she was feeling homesick and her mother sent a cassette tape of traditional Inuit song. She told The New Yorker, “I played it and it gutted me because it was home. I could hear... I could hear like, you know, the way I love the wind to blow. I could like sense the smell, the clean, clean smell of the land.”

Traditional throat singing usually involves a pair of female voices, but Tagaq taught herself the technique and cultivated it into her own fearsome, visceral style that incorporates elements of punk rock and electronica. And pop metal, she admitted in a recent tweet: “A lot of my musical training came from ironically singing to the guitar solos from 80's hair bands.”

Retribution, Tagaq’s latest album, is a contender for this year’s Polaris Prize, which will be awarded in September. Where Retribution is distinctive from her previous albums is in how these new songs themselves carry her political messages, which are more like warnings, many of them focused on the environment. A spoken word segment in the title song portends: “Our mother grows angry/Retribution will be swift/We squander her soil and suck out her sweet, black blood to burn it.”

Retribution closes with a staggering cover of Nirvana’s “Rape Me,” which, Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald points out, possesses “a haunting tension set against the context of the abuse and murder of Indigenous women.”

When Tanya Tagaq’s Animus won the 2014 Polaris Prize – a prestigious music award annually given to the best full-length Canadian album based on artistic merit – it made international news. Not only did the Inuk throat singer unexpectedly beat out pop darlings Arcade Fire and Drake, but she used the opportunity to support traditional seal hunting, a critical livelihood for many Inuit communities, and criticize activists who oppose the practice.

“Why is it everyone else is allowed to live off their land and profit, but we're not?” she demanded, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “And is it because you think the seal is cute?”

Tagaq isn’t shy about controversy, often speaking out about racism and the impact of colonialism on Inuit culture. In a 2015 interview with The New Yorker she said, “My daughters are four times more likely to be murdered than any other racial demographic in Canada. So how do I change this, how do I help? That's what I'm projecting my voice for."

The names of 1,182 missing aboriginal women scrolled on the screen behind Tagaq during her performance at the 2014 Polaris Award gala event – a performance described by Montreal’s The Gazette as “euphoric,” “cathartic” and “a wordless juxtaposition of grunts, screams, whispers and flutters...[that took the audience] on a mesmeric journey evoking life and death, birth and rebirth, love and loss.”

Tagaq’s introduction to throat singing came in college, when she was feeling homesick and her mother sent a cassette tape of traditional Inuit song. She told The New Yorker, “I played it and it gutted me because it was home. I could hear... I could hear like, you know, the way I love the wind to blow. I could like sense the smell, the clean, clean smell of the land.”

Traditional throat singing usually involves a pair of female voices, but Tagaq taught herself the technique and cultivated it into her own fearsome, visceral style that incorporates elements of punk rock and electronica. And pop metal, she admitted in a recent tweet: “A lot of my musical training came from ironically singing to the guitar solos from 80's hair bands.”

Retribution, Tagaq’s latest album, is a contender for this year’s Polaris Prize, which will be awarded in September. Where Retribution is distinctive from her previous albums is in how these new songs themselves carry her political messages, which are more like warnings, many of them focused on the environment. A spoken word segment in the title song portends: “Our mother grows angry/Retribution will be swift/We squander her soil and suck out her sweet, black blood to burn it.”

Retribution closes with a staggering cover of Nirvana’s “Rape Me,” which, Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald points out, possesses “a haunting tension set against the context of the abuse and murder of Indigenous women.”